


Pound for Pound

by stiction



Series: Shadowboxer [1]
Category: Transformers (IDW 2019), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Enthusiastic Consent, F/F, Jealousy, Mild Breathplay, Rough Sex, Under-negotiated Kink, flamewar is the bratty bottom we deserve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-01
Updated: 2020-05-01
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:14:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23787658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stiction/pseuds/stiction
Summary: After they blow the old base, Flamewar indulges in a favorite pasttime: goading Shadow Striker into playing rough.She's a pro at it now.
Relationships: Flamewar/Shadow Striker
Series: Shadowboxer [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1810393
Comments: 6
Kudos: 28





	Pound for Pound

“Brat,” Shadow Striker spits. 

Flamewar grins right in her face, waiting for her moment to shine, the vital second where Shadow Striker tips from furious to _sexy_ furious. The shift is always fast, and messy at that—Shadow Striker’s as liable to flip her over and strip the paint from her aft as she is to frag her hard enough to dent their armor. Now, right now, after Flamewar’s fragged up bad enough that the old base is nothing but scrap metal and vaporized plastics, it’s a toss-up.

“I know what you want,” Shadow Striker says, the bar of her arm digging into Flamewar’s neck, hand pulling at her armor until it strains at her protoform. Joke’s on Shadow Striker. Flamewar will take anything. Her frame is hot from the firefight and the race across the plains, heating further at the stinging tug of her armor fastenings. “And I don’t plan to give it to you.” 

Flamewar cracks then, laughing as she catches the sizzle off Shadow Striker’s plating because yeah, _sure_ , this is going to end with anything other than Shadow Striker railing her through the berth, using her dented finial as a handhold. She’s been waiting on this since she managed to catch the transport, since she crashed into the seat across from Shadow Striker and caught the full weight of her glare. She fucked up today. She fucked up _bad_ today. 

Shadow Striker growls, her grip shifting faster than Flamewar can track, a hand on one of her wheels and the other arm cinched tight over the dents Cyclonus left in her chassis, and frag Shadow Striker for that one, really, that hurts a little too much to be sexy. And now she’s airborne again, twice in one lucky, lucky cycle as Shadow Striker hucks her onto the berth. Great. 

Flamewar always wishes the rumors were true, that the higher up the ranks you go, the better the accommodations, but Shadow Striker’s dusty new berth is as flat and hard as her old one, the same model as any grunt’s. Flamewar hits it chest-first and skids. It takes her a moment to get her hands under herself, to flip over and relish the whining sing of her fuel pump as her frame revs up for another round, a different fight. By the time she’s leaning back on her arms, Shadow Striker is already kneeling up between her feet. 

_Not gonna give it to me_ , Flamewar thinks. Her smug satisfaction is already chipping away at the aches battering her sensors. _Right._

Her wounded pride rallies at the look on Shadow Striker’s face. There’s not much Flamewar has to her name, but she’s the only one who gets Shadow Striker loosened up, pushes and prods at her until she stops pretending to be anything but the incredible, ruthless mech she is. 

It’s not gonna take much more this time around. Tonight’s a sweet set-up: Shadow Striker’s already revved up from the chaos, same as she is, already ticked off, and at _her_ , too. 

But Shadow Striker stalls out there, her fans clicking to life as she glares down her nose, hands tensing to fists and falling open again and again like she wants to touch, wants to grab, but won’t. Whatever’s stuck up her tailpipe is above Flamewar’s pay grade. Situation’s perfect, and it’s not like _she’s_ injured or anything. The cabling in her neck is so tight it’d twang if Flamewar flicked it. 

Flamewar will get her there. It’ll just take a nudge. She starts off easy, lets her knees fall open so her searing hot chassis is exposed, the biolights under her custom paint starting to glow and her hip armor like an arrow pointing to her array, saying, _hey, to the Pit with my optics, my valve is down here!_ It works, the same as it always does, especially when she shifts her weight to one hand and drags the other down her front, over the pulsing lights and her dented armor, teasing at her transformation seams. Her patience is thin on a day like today but she clings to it.

When Shadow Striker reaches out at last, her hands gripping Flamewar’s knees, Flamewar’s fans kick right up. Charge rushes out from the touch and her frame hurts so good, even with her twisted finial throbbing and a shadow of actual danger lurking where she can tell, she just knows that at least one of the fuel lines in her abdomen is pinched. She doesn’t want to go see a medic. She wants Shadow Striker to wreck her first. She wants to have _fun_.

“Come on,” she sighs. “Shadow, you know—”. 

“I told you not to call me that,” Shadow Striker snaps, the tic in her jaw returning. “It’s childish.”

Flamewar makes a rude noise, digs her fingers deeper into the armor gap in her hip and follows it with an overblown sigh. “Well, I thought about calling you Striker instead, but then I thought, no, that’s too close to that Senator, y’know, Strika—” She stops at the clench of Shadow Striker’s hands on the joints of her knees, another laugh snapping out. “Oh, does that get you going? That turns your crankshaft? You wanna think about me getting spiked hard by _Senator Strika_ , hear me moaning her name?”

The red of Shadow Striker’s optics flares so bright it hurts to look at them, but Flamewar holds her stare, heat warming her array even further. 

“She’s big, too, way bigger than you.” Flamewar takes her hand from her cables, reaches out to tweak the edge of Shadow Striker’s helm. “No offense,” she adds, winking because she knows it makes Shadow Striker furious—Shadow Striker probably _can’t_ wink, weird optics and all that, but it’s likely more the audacity that ticks her off. Flamewar’s heard from several unit leaders that she’s audacious. “Blocky frame like that… I bet she’s got a spike to match.”

Heat pours off Shadow Striker’s frame. The dark thrum of her field could level a city. 

Flamewar goes for broke, pops her panel and rolls her hips so that Shadow Striker’s optics dip immediately to the wetness of her valve. She knows how she looks by now, hot down to her protoform, little snaps of charge arcing under her plating, dead revved up since Shadow Striker snapped at her out by the memorial and she started thinking about getting pinned down in the dirt and fragged for her mistakes, to the Pit with the cause. She drags it out with a bit-off groan, a little hiss as she runs her fingers over the hot mesh. Her spike cover stays locked because, well, she’s had this instinctual twinge since the last time Shadow Striker hauled her up by her wrists and fragged her into the wall of the briefing room, the expectation unspoken but understood that she was going to get only what Shadow Striker wanted to give her, which was to say, _no helping hands_. She’s mostly a valve mech anyway, but she’s kept that information to herself. It’s not half as fun if Shadow Striker knows all of her secrets. 

The wet drag of her thumb over the cover is still enough to send a jolt through her legs, her feet tensing against the berth, but she focuses on her valve, her node, watching Shadow Striker watch her hand moving. She doesn’t bother taking her time. As soon as her audials dial into the quiet click of Shadow Striker’s vents widening, right on cue, Flamewar whimpers. Shadow Striker’s optics snap to her face, of course they do. Shadow Striker isn’t a voyeur by habit but she likes to see Flamewar melt. 

Flamewar tilts her head, fixes her with a stunner of a slack-jawed, frag-me face (she knows it’s good, she practiced it for months in the mirror before she used it on anyone), and with a stress crackle in her vocalizer she moans: “Oh, Strika—!”

Shadow Striker goes dead still. Flamewar shoves her laugh down deep until it’s buried by the giddy rush of success. Shadow Striker is so fragging mad. 

“Strika,” Flamewar whines, twitching her hips against her own fingers like she’s gonna die if something doesn’t fill her valve in the next thirty nanokliks. She keeps her own touch light, rubbing right over the entrance to her valve but letting her fingers dip no deeper. “Strika, ah, Senator, please!”

“Shut _up_ ,” Shadow Striker snarls. “For frag’s sake. You really think you need to make me _more_ angry right now?”

Flamewar doesn’t bother hiding it now, lets her grin go wide and wild as Shadow Striker slaps her hand away and shoves two fingers deep into her valve. Her other hand pins Flamewar’s knee to the berth, the stretch so sudden and searing on her exhausted cabling that Flamewar grunts and jerks against it. They’re so close now, no more space, exactly what she wanted as Shadow Striker crowds her, her mouth set in a snarl. 

She bites back the urge to headbutt, to push her luck. She’s getting her way now, sure, but if she doesn’t play nice there’s no guarantee Shadow Striker won’t boot her out on her aft, panels still popped, valve soaked and spike aching under its lock. The only thing stopping Shadow Striker from doing just that every time Flamewar acts up is probably that she knows Flamewar well enough to know that she would only sprawl shamelessly against her hab door, legs spread for Primus and all the Rise to see, yowling like a turbofox in heat until she’s let back in. 

Sometimes she wants to yowl like a turbofox in heat just for the fun of it, just to watch Shadow Striker’s disbelieving look fade into annoyance and anger that someone would threaten her stone cold reputation. If she focuses on the fantasy she can already kinda feel Shadow Striker’s tense hand holding her jaw shut or shoving fingers into her mouth to muffle her vocalizer. Like the team hasn’t heard them a half dozen times before. The Rise’s priorities do not include soundproofed rooms. 

“Hurry up,” she says, cables in her shoulders cricking as she hunches over to watch Shadow Striker’s fingers disappearing into her valve. In tandem with the wave of sensor feedback, her circuits swamp with energy. It’s not enough, not when she knows how it’d feel if Shadow Striker would up the ante and pop her panels and just spike her already. She wants it so bad that she needles her again: “Get your spike out or I’ll take this smoking hot frame down to the Senate apartments and lay myself at you-know-who’s tender mercies.”

A growl rips out of Shadow Striker’s vocalizer and now there’s another finger in Flamewar’s valve, more internal nodes lighting up at the pressure and the mesh stretching, so seethingly good that she wants to scream even as Shadow Striker’s other hand abandons her knee to grip her neck. Her arm buckles immediately and she goes where she’s pushed, her wheels jammed against the berth under Shadow Striker’s frame, which is hot, it’s _so_ hot when Shadow Striker throws her weight around. It changes the angle of the fingers she has jammed in Flamewar’s valve, too, but she wants, she needs, more. Flamewar’s grunt is choked off by the hand on her throat, her vocalizer grinding. She shoves her hips up against Shadow Striker’s hand, hoping to get something, anything, any attention to her anterior node. 

It doesn’t come, but beyond the energon surging to her processor and the charge collecting in her array she hears the click of Shadow Striker’s panel opening. When she refocuses her optics, Shadow Striker’s gaze is vibroblade-sharp on her array. 

Shadow Striker pins the hinge of her jaw with her thumb when Flamewar tries to crane her neck to peek. The grip is loose enough that it doesn’t cut off her energon supply and that’s sweet and all but it also feels like she’s being coddled. She can’t see anything like this, which is just no fair, Shadow Striker’s spike is _awesome_.

“C’mon,” Flamewar rasps, vocalizer a crackling, over-synthesized mess. Shadow Striker looks at her again, finally, and Flamewar’s spark sears in its chamber when she sees those optics readjust. How far were they zoomed in? How closely was Shadow Striker examining her valve, watching her own fingers disappear? She grits her teeth as her charge spikes to throttle back from an early overload. It’ll be so much better if she can just wait another klik. Just another klik. “Frag me.”

Shadow Striker’s face runs the gamut of possible expressions, fast enough that Flamewar would miss it if she wasn’t waiting, delighted, for it to happen. That simmering annoyance competing with how bad Flamewar _knows_ she wants to give in, the stubborn set of her jaw at war with the shift of her hips. That’s the thing with Shadow Striker—she’s smart enough to know that Flamewar is playing her, and absolutely furious that it works. She’s smart enough to play her own version of the game right back. If she’s a little uncreative about it, it just gives Flamewar more cable to string her up with. 

Her fingers stop joint-deep in Flamewar’s valve, her knuckles stretching the rim a little, enough to twinge, and it can’t be a coincidence that Shadow Striker’s fingertips nudge up against her hard-to-reach nodes and keep those shocky jumps of pleasure coming one after the other. Flamewar grips at Shadow Striker chassis, scrabbling at her plating like she can just pull Shadow Striker up on top of her proper, like Shadow Striker’s frame isn’t a whole half ton heavier than hers. The hand on her neck grows heavy as Shadow Striker puts her weight onto it, Flamewar grunting even as her fuel pump pounds and her processor bleats a warning about fuel line compression. 

That’s more like it. 

She reaches for Shadow Striker’s spike and barely brushes it with her fingers before Shadow Striker hisses a warning and grabs her wrist. 

“Stop,” she snaps, shoving Flamewar’s hand back to the berth. “Stop it. Your impatience will get you nowhere.”

Flamewar tenses, prepares to fight, until Shadow Striker shoves right back into her valve, fingers flexing into the clench of her calipers. She bares her teeth, bucks her hips again, hard enough that Shadow Striker’s knuckles grind into her nodes with a spark straddling the line of pain.

“You think I want you to screw up?” Shadow Striker asks. “You think I like watching that stuck-up bolthead slap you around?” Her wrist jerks—Flamewar whines, an aching empty pit—and then three fingers snap forward, a tightly-bound drive against the roof of her valve, the interior rim of her spike housing. 

Flamewar’s vocalizer chokes a silent curse. She scrabbles at Shadow Striker’s wrist, with both hands. She’s already riding the tense wave of an overload, balancing right where it hurts. There’s no way she can move Shadow Striker’s arm on her own. It’s only a moment of unreadable mercy that has Shadow Striker releasing her throat. 

Her hands go then to Flamewar’s hips, framing her empty valve as her charge fizzles, drops, rages again when Shadow Striker hikes her hips up and ruts against the lips of her valve. 

“Y’only—” Flamewar slurs. “You only like it when it’s you, pushing me around. Yelling.”

“That’s right,” Shadow Striker says. The ridges on her spike catch Flamewar’s node and shock a sharp noise out of her.

“Just you—” she babbles. The energon in her lines rushes sharp and urgent. She can’t stop squirming, trying to hitch her legs open further. Shadow Striker’s optics dip to her valve, then back to her face, and then the next tilt of her hips drives her spike home. “Frag,” Flamewar spits, force resetting her vocalizer with a snap as her frame tenses and bears down around the fullness. 

Shadow Striker doesn’t go easy on her. She never does, Flamewar would _riot_ if she did. She grabs hold of Flamewar’s chestpiece and hauls her into her first sharp thrusts. 

The dull ache in Flamewar’s armor throbs. She scrabbles for something to hold on to before she remembers there’s nothing, the berth is empty because she went and fucked up the good base. Not a single pillow, no blankets, only the squealing grind of her wheel frames against the hard top. 

Oh, it’s good. She hasn’t messed up in forever, and never bad enough to warrant a backhand and a dose of wargrade explosives that’d have her smoking under her panels any other day. Never bad enough to warrant a dressing-down from a supervisor that wasn’t Shadow Striker. In that moment Shadow Striker had looked ready to rip out Sixshot’s spark with her bare hand. 

Her cheek still stings. The look in Shadow Striker’s optics still screams murder. To the Void with the little bits of slag she’d collected, she’s busy digging her fingers into the side seams of Shadow Striker’s plating and keening as the hand on her hip pops dents. 

Her vocalizer runs with her thoughts: _yes, yes, please yes, primus_

Shadow Striker grunts, grabs one of her knees and pushes it to her chest next to the hold on her chest plate. The plating on her chassis groans and gives, folding in a groove where Cyclonus’ fist had landed. Heat floods out from the crease, oh, something has _definitely_ pinched in there. 

Even that feels good, everything feels good, she’s tense and loose and burning hot all over, begging with her mouth and her field for more. Flamewar’s not prone to love but from what she knows this is as close as she’s gonna get: a burning intensity, an overwhelming something that someone beats into you. 

Her charge is almost redlining already, sharp and sweet as Shadow Striker’s jaw drops. For a moment she looks younger. The slackness of her mouth belies the harsh snap of her hips. 

It hurts and it leaves Flamewar’s lines pounding with charge. Her gauntlets sputter. She’s used up all her extra fuel stores, dumped it all on that security goon. He should’ve known not to bring a lance to a firefight. Dumbaft. Dumber than her. She catches Shadow Striker’s flinch and the way she doubles down after it, leaning her weight onto Flamewar’s leg until the cables pull taut and her back has to give first, rounding to lift her hips a little more. 

Shadow Striker’s spike sinks deeper on the next thrust. Flamewar’s helm slams back against the berth. Her finial twinges and her valve tightens and her overload builds in the space of half a klik before it bursts and drenches her frame in ungrounded sparks. 

She gropes for Shadow Striker’s wrists, holds tight through the wracking overload. Her HUD spits out an overheating warning, cut off by the damage report about her plating, cut off by her own vicious focus circling back to Shadow Striker. The weight on her frame has eased even though she’s told Shadow Striker a dozen times not to slow down when she overloads. A well-loved code string activates, overriding her array protocols. Her nodes reset and blink right back into action in time to translate the drag of Shadow Striker’s spike from a dull, uncomfortable pressure to pleasure. 

Shadow Striker bares her own teeth, shining but not half as sharp as Flamewar’s. She wants—she wants—she cranes her neck and sinks her teeth into the soft metal of Shadow Striker’s wrist. The growl it gets her vibrates in her fuel pump. Energon trickles over her tongue, sweet and a little dirty from the exertion of the day. Her leg falls to Shadow Striker’s waist with a dull clang that echoes straight up her aching chassis as Shadow Striker seizes her bent finial and forces her helm back. 

“Stop,” Shadow Striker orders, and Flamewar’s jaw drops. 

She manages one more messy lick over the leak before Shadow Striker snatches her hands out of reach. Her glare is mutinous. Her spike is still buried deep, recursive charge cycling between their mirrored nodes as an inscrutable something passes over her face. Flamewar’s about to complain when Shadow Striker scowls, hooks her arms under Flamewar’s knees, and bends her nearly in half. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Flamewar shouts. The notch in her armor bends further until it bites into vital circuitry and leaves Flamewar venting desperately, dismissing warnings on her HUD as another heavy charge builds in her array. She can still taste energon on her tongue when she comes again, in a slower, deeper, wave. The struts in her legs vibrate with the strain, unable to snap together with Shadow Striker’s broad shoulders keeping her open. 

She doesn’t bother resetting her array. She bites back a whine as Shadow Striker braces her hands on the wall and lets her weight do the work. Even dazed, she can tell that Shadow Striker is close by the way she frags, like she’s going to dent the berth. The heavy rumble of her engine almost drowns out the hum of her fans, the heat of her body overtaking the cooling curve of Flamewar’s. 

“Come on,” she says, grabbing for Shadow Striker’s armor and clawing into the planes of her back. She’s laid thinner there, easier for Flamewar to jam her fingertips into the seams and pull just hard enough to sting. “Frag me like you mean it, come on, fill me—”

And Shadow Striker does. The halting flex of her hips grinds her spike against every overclocked node in Flamewar’s valve, each little shock a sweet ache as she holds on, tenses her calipers until the first wash of transfluid knocks her array into temporary stasis. She can still feel Shadow Striker’s spike twitching in her valve when she pulls free. 

One hand pins Flamewar’s hips to the berth, palm firm on the buckle of her chassis plating, and she watches as Shadow Striker drops the other to her spike, fisting it so the rest of her transfluid falls in the cradle of Flamewar’s hips. She feels that more than the transfluid inside her. Her plating tingles where it’s marked. A lone drop slides down toward her valve. Ever-ambitious, her array rallies and tries to come back online, but she reroutes the charge. Not that she doesn’t appreciate the sentiment, but she’s tired, and if she worked up again Shadow Striker’s not going to deal with it. 

Shadow Striker watches her a moment as her fans wind down. She’s making that expression again, like she can’t decide what she’s feeling or doesn’t care to share. Flamewar does her best impression of it, albeit with a little more grimacing. Shadow Striker snorts and rolls her optics before she drops to the berth. 

The warnings on Flamewar’s HUD remain in the queue, overtaken by the satisfaction of a frag well done. She even gets a blissful klik of afterglow and all of the cable-loosening, strut-softening aftershocks it entails before Shadow Striker stirs into motion with a displeased grunt. 

“Get back to your bunk,” she grumbles. 

Flamewar flaps a hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah. I will. As soon as my hydraulics come back online.”

Shadow Striker turns her helm, a mute question in her stare. 

“You really did a number on me this time,” Flamewar says, shrugging. She doesn’t bother to hide how pleased she is. She thinks the Rise could use a little more positive reinforcement sometimes, and praise _has_ occasionally been known to grease Shadow Striker’s pistons. “Knocked my gyro out of whack, too.”

Shadow Striker studies her like she’s looking for the catch. It’s a lucky thing that Flamewar isn’t after anything more than a good frag. She winks, and Shadow Striker frowns. 

“Should probably hit the washracks, too,” Flamewar muses.

“You can use your own washracks.”

“But—”

“No buts,” Shadow Striker snaps, sets her up so beautifully for another play.

“But people will _see_ ,” Flamewar says. She gestures to the mess of her chassis, the transfluid and lubricant smeared on her thighs. “I know how important your privacy is to you.”

Shadow Striker’s optics linger on Flamewar’s frame, on the slick mess that she made, before she lifts her arm and studies the bite mark on her wrist. She drops it with a sour noise and turns her helm back to the wall.

All the better to miss Flamewar’s grin. She’s done well tonight. If she plays her cards right, she’ll be kneeling on the floor of the washracks in half a joor, one strong hand on her helm as Shadow Striker fucks her mouth. 

Flamewar pumps her fist as silently as she can. _Nice._

**Author's Note:**

> i mean have you seen flamewar


End file.
